The thirteen letters of Josef Frank

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University of Trieste, Triest, Italy

The thirteen letters of Josef Frank

Guaragna Gianfranco

Abstract

Josef Frank (1885-1967) certainly occupies a prominent place in the central European architectural scenery of the early twentieth century.

His work is entirely devoted to living and of course, in addition to having designed furniture, furnishings and beautiful fabrics, Frank designs and creates architectures.

The furniture and objects of furniture that he produces in Vienna at the beginning of the twenties, bom on the idea of English furniture from which he takes inspiration to reinterpret the models and adapting them to new needs, perhaps throw a new light on the origins of that kind of furniture that we generally consider "Scandinavian".

For Frankthe language of architecture is not only a metaphor of the narration but could also become language in the strict sense; even to the point of substituting written text, as it happens for example in a singular correspondence exchange with a woman.

The letters we refer to are instead those in which architecture, or better, its graphic representation, substitutes words to concretely undertake -not only conceptually- the value of prose, of the written text. Architecture that can sometimes even become an idiomatic mean of seduction, as it happens to a certain extent in the thirteen letters that Josef Frank sent to Dagmar Grill in 1947.

Keywords: Architecture, Letters, Language, Houses, Frank

frank architectural furniture interior

Абстракт

Гваранья Джанфранко

Университет г.Триест, Триест, Италия

ТРИНАДЦАТЬ ПИСЕМ ЙОЗЕФА ФРЭНКА

Йозеф Франк (1885-1967), безусловно, занимает видное место в центральной европейской архитектурной панораме начала двадцатого века.

Его творчество полностью нацелено на проектирование жилого пространства и, конечно, в дополнение к дизайну мебели, интерьера и красивых тканей, Фрэнк проектирует и строит архитектуру.

Мебель и объекты обстановки, которые были созданы им в Вене в начале 1920-х годов, родились из идеи английской мебели, модели которой были переосмыслены и адаптированы к новым потребностям, возможно, с целью переосмысления этого типа мебели и предметов интерьера, которые мы обычно считаем "скандинавскими".

Для Фрэнка язык архитектуры является не только «метафорой для повествования», но это «язык» в строгом смысле данного понятия, который может заменить письменный текст, который используется, например, при переписке с женщиной.

Тем не менее, вопрос, который мы рассматриваем, не касается гипотетической связи между архитектурой и литературным жанром эпистолярного романа, а также не анализирует типы соответствия, в котором предметом является архитектура, и эпистолярные соответствия между архитекторами. Символы, о которых мы хотим поговорить, это то, чем архитектура, или, скорее, ее графическое представление, заменяет слова, обобщая - не только концептуально - значение повествования, составленного текста.

Архитектура, которая может использоваться как идиоматический инструмент обольщения, как это происходит в тринадцати «письмах», которые Джозеф Франк послал Дагмару Грилю в 1947 году.

Ключевые слова: Архитектура, Письма, Язык, Дома, Фрэнк

Introduction

Architecture and writing have always been linked together. Indeed, ever since writing was invented, the inscriptions have always been part of the surface of the buildings: from the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians and the Hittites, to the cuneiform texts of Assyrians and Babylonians, to the Greek inscriptions.

However, we must consider that the relationship between architecture and writing it must necessarily be traced back to the origins of man, since they can both be traced back indirectly to the same faculty of individual; that is to say, to that particular capacity which has enabled the human being to relate to the context through the construction of tools and linguistic symbols.

Architecture and literature, therefore, being both the product of the evolution of this same characteristic, although they are two objectively different areas, in reality they are much closer than they may appear, and they are so to the extent that they resolvethe perspicuity of differences in the evocative capacity of the storytelling.

When Luciano Semerani appropriately observes that the narration constitutes for Frank the practical model in which to dissipate creative paradoxes and the aporias connected with the temporal notion itself, and that through the narration he brings the experience of relativistic time inside the language of architecture [1], he clearly underlines the prominent role of the narration inside the entire Frankian work. Nevertheless, although underlining the close connection between architecture and narration, Semerani maybe neglects that for Frank the language of architecture is not only a metaphor of the narration but could also become language in the strict sense; even to the point of substituting written text, as it happens for example in a singular correspondence exchange with a woman.

Considering that private letters represent an essentially disappeared genre, that had for centuries a crucial importance in European culture, the theme of correspondence, of course, is an important topic of literature However, it has to be specified that the topic we refer to in not the hypothetical relationship between architecture and the literature genre of epistolary novel, neither is that type of correspondence having architecture as a topic, namely exchange of letters among architects. The letters we refer to are instead those in which architecture, or better, its graphic representation, substitutes words to concretely undertake -not only conceptually- the value of prose, of the written text. Architecture that can sometimes even become an idiomatic means of seduction, as it happens to a certain extent in the thirteen letters that Josef Frank sent to Dagmar Grill in 1947.

Indeed, thirteen letters could seem to be a negligible number compared with the three hundred sixty seven that Ungaretti, already eighty-four years old, wrote to BrunaBianco, a brilliant twenty-six years old lady he met in Sao Paulo of Brazil in 1966 after an University lecture [2]. From that encounter an intense correspondence, will begin in which, although being a private collection of letters, Ungaretti does not renounce to a varied and modulated literary style, in which, even if dissimulated in a variety of themes, the inner rules of his poetry and the vision supporting it, never succumb. In this multitude of letters the recurrent theme is happiness. A happiness that, according to the Ungarettian thinking, is bound to the secret of poetry itself, but that for Frank, in a certainly less touching way, it is maybe hidden in the secret of architecture. While Ungaretti entrusts his feelings to an impeccable literary prose, Frank, in the letters he sent to Dagmar Grill, in order to convey the same feelings, entrusts the tools that are proper to him, expressing itself, so to speak, in a poetic form that uses different idioms.

However, to better clarify what we are taking about, it is probably necessary a brief introduction, to remember who Josef Frank was and to understand the nature of the letters we refer to.

Josef Frank (1885-1967) certainly occupies a prominent place in the central European architectural scenery of the early twentieth century. The furniture and objects of furniture that he produces in Vienna at the beginning of the 1920s, bom on the idea of English furniture from which he takes inspiration to reinterpret the models and adapting them to new needs, perhaps throw a new light over the origins of the kind of furniture that we generally consider "Scandinavian". His furniture, in fact, had already been presented at the Exposition intemationale des Arts Decoratifs et industriels of Paris in 1925, but when in 1934 he exhibited them in Stockholm, where he had moved the previous year, they had an extraordinary success and besides being appreciated, the Austrian architect recalls, they were soon also imitated; thus completely revolutionizing the concept of Swedish furniture that before then was generally in style, ie shaped on historical models without major variations [3].

His work is entirely devoted to living and, of course, in addition to having designed furniture, furnishings and beautiful fabrics, Frank designs and creates architectures. He designed Siedlung but above all houses. Original items imbued with a strong Mediterranean character, where the Loosian Raumplan develops in paths where the spaces follow one another according to a helical sense that gradually winds to lead us to the rooms above and ends up in the terraces.

Among its many projects, there are thirteen houses dedicated to a woman who, however, can not be considered just as simple architectural works, but must be interpreted as a true gesture of love.

In 1957, in fact, after the death of his wife, Frank will definitely move to Stockholm with the wife's cousin, Dagmar Grill, to whom ten years earlier he had sent thirteen letters accompanied by as many projects. Those are thirteen houses that in some way follow a 1926 project for an ideal contextualized house in one of the islands of the archipelago located to the east of the Swedish capital, where Dagmar lived at that time.

The two had known each other since 1914, when the Grill had moved from Stockholm to Vienna to practice her profession of physiotherapist at the Stromberg- Palm Physical Education School, for which the Viennese architect had designed the interiors in 1910. Later, around the twenties, Dagmar will leave this job to go to work in the furniture company Haus&Garten, founded by Frank himself along with Stmad and Wlach.

Probably it is during this period that their relationship is bom or strengthened, in any case, between July 22nd and August 15th, 1947, Frank will send to the woman the thirteen aforementioned letters. Each missive contains a series of architectural sketches made up of plants and prospects of a hypothetical single-family house, accompanied by some brief commentary notes.

The different projects, each marked with a progressive number associated with the word house, will later be collected by the Austrian architect and the drawings, although arranged in a different order than the initial numbering, will be placed on three sheets of transparent paper. Furthermore, in the following years he will also realize magnificent watercolour drawings [4].

Given this, it cannot go unnoticed that Frank, when writing the letters to his beloved one, replaces the words with the language of architecture. If the poet expresses his love in verses, Frank communicates his feelings through the architectural vocabulary. Architecture becomes a word. The drawing replaces the word, the sentence, the speech; but this should not be understood in a metaphorical sense, nor exchanged for cheap rhetoric. Frank, in fact, in one of his letters, as Christina Kruml points out, defines these projects with the Swedish term of Kranglig which means complicated, intricate, but could also be translated into seductive [5], and that of Frank is indeed a work of seduction in which architecture becomes the logos in its etymological meaning.

The psychoanalyst Aldo Carotenuto asserts that in seduction the subject renounces to his subjectivity to become a phantomatic object, because in the seduction no one exists, as the other becomes something that has activated my world under the pressure of my needs. Moreover, Carotenuto points out, the seduction stems from the absence of clearly decipherable signs and so I am allowed to give my images to that reality, and although in seduction there is still an evident aspect that allows to explain in part the charm of the seducer, there is also an ever-present hidden aspect. "The seducer is such because he lets himself be guessed, he does not speak or his words are cryptic and they need to be interpreted." [6].

Now, although we know that sexual selection, as Darwin intuited, concerns our sense of beauty which activates certain areas of the brain, how can one think of seducing a woman, who is not even an architect but a physiotherapist, with some simple architectural drawings?

Naturally, it would be easy to find an answer by deeply exploring the endless Freudian symbology, from which we could certainly extrapolate the whole series of elements that somehow refer awkwardly to a latent sexual appeal: from the relevance attributed to the chimneys, always in evidence, up to the composition based entirely on the overlap; thus on the dualism between horizontal and vertical, male and female, actor and spectator.

However, although an interpretation of this kind could probably please an intelligent "provocateur" like SlavojZizek, we know well that it would be an interpretation in some ways also intriguing but to say the least superficial, since the seductive message, if it exists, should not be sought in these obvious signs but it is a hidden message, less evident.

On the other hand, the fact that the message is latent, naturally does not mean that it does not exist, on the contrary, in our opinion it is very strong; and it is so precisely to the extent that it refers to the concept of beauty. Let's be careful, however, because we are not talking about a generic concept, but thanks to neuroaesthetics [7], perhaps we could discover that it is even biological beauty.

In fact, SemirZeki, the founder of this discipline, to give a scientific answer to a question related to beauty, namely what are the neural mechanisms that allow humans to experience beauty, claims for example that mathematical beauty belongs to the category of biological beauty; pointing out to us that Einstein's theory of relativity was also widely accepted, thanks to the extreme beauty of his mathematical formulations [8].

Not only. Vincenzo Barone, speaking of Einstein and of his real or presumed errors, observes that after the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered in 1929 that the cosmos was not static, the cosmological constant contained in the Einstein equation to demonstrate the theory of relativity was no longer needed, and the mathematical formula, "free of an unnecessary tinsel, could return to shine in all its beauty".

Moreover, he adds that in 1915, convincing Einstein of the correctness of the recently obtained gravitational field equations, was not only the fact that they explained a very small and know phenomenon (the anomaly of the orbit of Mercury), but its formal elegance [9].

Moreover, Benedetto Croce had already explained that logical thinking can be not only true but also beautiful, therefore a theory or a book, even if sometimes wrong, are judged not only according to the logic but also according to aesthetics [10].

Thus, as demonstrated by these recent studies, the principle is valid for mathematical formulation, it is not bold to think that even architectural beauty can belong to the same category. Were it so, of course, it would clarify many things, since not only would it allow us to understand the reasons why, in Frank's case, we can even talk about seduction, even if it is simply letters that contain only a series of architectural drawings, but above all it would explain scientifically and not only emotionally why, as Giovanni Fraziano points out, for Frank, "a cloth, a candlestick, a carpet, a wall, a floor, as well as a door, a fireplace, a stool, a chair, are like Architecture itself, not just but simply human things, analogous to the body, variables like breathing, a rhythmic sequence, a beating of wings. Reasons that escape the logic of time ... "[11].

Notes

1) “The narrative constitutes for Frank the practical model in which to dissolve the creative paradoxes, the aporias connected with the temporal notion itself. Mach had well destroyed the Newtonian idea of an absolute time. Loos has created space-time clots in his prosceni houses in which to recite the upper-middle class theater. Frank goes further. At the base of the story there is his theory, the story with the resources of fiction, the story is sequence. The simplification of sentences, words, their reduction to a high-rent everyday life, as in an architecture of transatlantic liners transferred over the Viennese hills, this alienation operation is the greatest achievement of this architect, however, so little considered, which leads through the story the experience of relativistic time within the language of architecture. "

Luciano Semerani, Dalla tautologia alia banalita, in La casa isolata Dalla tautologia alia banalita, a cura di Giovanni Fraziano, Venezia, Cluva Editrice, 1989, p. 18

2) Silvio Ramat, Giuseppe Ungaretti Lettere a Bruna, Mondadori, Milano, 2017

3) Viktor Matejka, Dodici domande a Josef Frank, in Josef Frank 1885-1967 Vita activa, a cura di Giovanni Fraziano, Lint editoriale srl, Trieste, 2011 pp.158, 159

4) Christina Kruml, Tredici case per Dogmar Grill, in Percorsi accidentali Scritti e progetti di Josef Frank, Giovanni Fraziano, Lint editoriale srl, Trieste, 2011 pp.128 a 161

5) Ibidem p. 128

6) Aldo Carotenuto, Eros e pathos Margini dell 'amore e della sofferenza, Ed. Saggi- Bompiani, Milano, 1993, pp. 49-55

7) “Neuroaesthetics help in the knowledge of human brain in accordance with a unique perspective, one of body and of thought embodied by the experience of art and, generally, of beauty. This discipline can also help us understand why art has become so important for human species and how it can be interpreted in a evolutionary key, as an experience capable of transmitting, in fiction, emotions that are useful for survival...''Anna Livigni,Caravaggio fascat- tarel'empatia, П sole 24 ore, domenica 28/10/2018

8) “Even though for many it was difficult to understand Albert Einstein's theory of relativity (published 1915/1916), at first it was widely accepted thanks to the extreme beauty of its mathematical formulations. Paul Dirac, English physicists, wrote in 1933: <What makes the theory of relativity so acceptable by physicists, even though it works against the principle of simplicity, is its great mathematical beauty>” Semir Zeki, Sesso bellezza ed equazioni, in П Sole 24 Ore 23/4/2017

9) Vincenzo Barone, Errori veri e presunti di Einstein, П Sole 24 Ore, 30/7/2017, p.24

10) “Evenlogical thought, as well as science, as it expresses itself, becomes feeling and fantasy. Which is the reason why books about philosophy, history or science can be not only truthful but also beautiful. They can be judged not only according to logic but also according to aesthetics. Sometimes they say a book is theoretically or critically or historically wrong, but it remains - because of the affection of the soul it expresses - in its capacity of work of art.”

Benedetto Croce, Breviario di Estetica, Aesthetica in nuce, Adelphi, Milano, 1994, p.224

11) Giovanni Fraziano, Joseph Frank 1885-1967 Vita active, a cura di Giovanni Franziano, Lint editoriale srl, Trieste, 2011 pp.10,11.

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